Monthly Archives: December 2015

After the astonishing amount of flooding, mainly in the North of England this year, people in the north are starting to accuse the government of having a bias against the North. And their reasoning? The government wouldn’t let this happen in the south. What naive fools.

Fox hunting in England has always been popular with the more bloodthirsty segments of society. Nothing gets the juices flowing quite like chasing an animal to rip it to shreds. Unfortunately this evil practice was limited in 2004, with the hunting of wild mammals using dogs being severely limited. So much so that if you want to kill animals for sport, you have to go to some slightly longer extremes than before. It’s still legal to dress up in full hunting gear and ride your horse across the countryside in pursuit of an animal, but if you want your dog to actually attack an animal, stick to hares, not foxes – that’s perfectly legal. Or alternatively, one or two dogs can still chase a fox – just make sure that you shoot the fox and claim it was for pest control if you do that.

However, those alternatives are just not evil enough. People should have the freedom to kill animals in as inhumane a way as they want, or so say a number of Tory MPs. They are encouraging Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin to set up a commission to explore new evidence, and look in to the “great benefits of fox hunting”.

These benefits are quite simple – they think it’s great fun and they think that the end justifies the means. By which they mean that it doesn’t matter how much suffering we inflict on animals as long as their numbers get cut in the most ruthless and entertaining way possible.

Despite this practice closely mirroring the Tory attitude to the poor, fox hunting is currently opposed by 83% of the population. It is opposed by as many rural people as urban, meaning this is a universally despised practice that most people were very glad to eradicate.

But, as the countryside alliance says “prime aim of hunting is not the numbers killed, but the health and smaller population left alive”. Yes, the fox numbers could be controlled without suffering to the fox (shooting for example), but that’s irrelevant. They point out that remaining foxes will be much happier once their relations have been killed, and it doesn’t matter how that killing is done. So why not dress up and have a bit of fun while killing them.

It should be obvious to anyone that this is a critical issue for parliament to spend it’s time on. No, there hasn’t been the time for a proper debate on some big issues like the bombing of Syria. And in the interests of saving time, numerous do-gooder bills have been blocked from debate by Tory back benchers (e.g. helping carers at hospitals, stopping landlords running unsafe properties, teaching first aid to kids, and many more). But trying to overturn a popular ban on the cruel treatment of animals is surely something that requires the time and cost of a committee being set up to investigate whatever tenuous benefits can be found so that this can be debated by all MPs. Mwhahaha.

Immigration

The bible claims (Matthew 2:13) that when Jesus was a baby, his family fled to Egypt to avoid the persecution of Herod, who was killing all baby boys. There’s a bit of a lack of detail, but we assume that the Pharaohs didn’t try to demonize them for their own political gain. How does that compare to the UK?

With no apparent sense of irony, Cameron also remarks on how lucky we are to be secure with our families around us, while millions of refugees are spending a harsh winter in makeshift camps across the middle east. That comes in the same week as the news that we have housed just 1000 refugees so far. Compare that to Germany, who are buckling under the weight of nearly a million refugees, and you start to wonder just what happened to our Christian values.

The poor

The bible tells us that Jesus had pretty strong opinions about the poor – basically that we should be nice to the poor. For example, in Mark 10:21 he told a rich man “go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven”.

In contrast, Iain Duncan Smith agrees that the poorest working families will be worse off by £1600 next year thanks to his benefits cuts, and suggests that they all just go out and work an extra 200 hours to make up for it. Not exactly the rich looking after the poor.

The sick

Again the bible tells us that Jesus was generally sympathetic towards the sick. Admittedly 1st century medicine was a little basic, so praying was just about the best that was on offer, but it seems to have been pretty effective, with Jesus curing leprosy, blindness and other sicknesses at a rate otherwise unheard of in pre-antibiotic times.

The UK record on health is not doing so well. Funding is being slashed by £18bn, and junior doctors are being screwed for every penny possible. Waiting lists are up, and health is down.

Anyone unlucky enough to become long term sick is also in trouble, with strong evidence that government cuts in disability benefits causing increasing levels of hardship and suicide.

Tax collectors

Jesus really wasn’t a fan of tax collectors. Luke in particular vilifies them as the worst kind of sinner. The main gripe is when the tax collected is unfair, and then goes to the rich.

One of the most evil Tory taxes is the bedroom tax, where people who are deemed to have too many rooms have their benefits docked. It doesn’t matter if the person is disabled and the room is for a 24 hour carer to sleep in – they get docked anyway. Last week the government admitted that the tax was resulting in people going without food just to make ends meet.

Other tax news recently had George Osborne propose a 93% tax rate for the poorest. The richest by contrast had their tax rate cut to 45% by the Tories.

Happy Christmas

It’s pretty evident that the government has been looking to the bible for inspiration. Jesus spelled out a great list of evil things, and the government seems to be uptaking them all with great gusto. Mwhahaha!

In Paris last week, world leaders from 195 countries signed an historic agreement to limit global temperature changes to 1.5 degrees. That’s necessary to avoid London being flooded by the end of the century, so it’s probably for the best that they did that. However, despite signing the agreement the UK government has been cancelling any project which would help us to meet those targets. Mwhahaha.

To meet this target, UN scientists say that we must all be a net neutral emissions producer by 2070. The UK emissions have been declining in recent years (in large part due to the move away from burning coal), but nowhere near quickly enough to become carbon neutral by 2070. There were ambitious plans to move us in the right direction though – converting to renewable energy, carbon capture when we burn fossil fuels, and improving housing efficiency. All of those schemes were cancelled in the past year by Energy Secretary Amber Rudd. She has stopped solar panels from being erected, blocked onshore wind farms, cancelled a carbon capture project just as it was about to be completed, increased taxes on electric cars while cutting taxes on the most polluting cars, campaigned to relax the laws on car emissions, and cancelled a scheme which helps people insulate their homes. Instead she has subsidized the heavily polluting burning of shale gas, and on Friday, the same day as the Paris deal was signed, the government signed a deal to subsidise a number of new Diesel, Gas and even Coal powered stations.

Rather than attempting to defend this evil policy, Amber Rudd simply parrots that she is bringing energy prices down for consumers. Yes, she’s saving us a pound or two, but at the cost of a planet to live on. Her defence is that she wants companies to invest in new technology to provide cleaner energy for a cheaper price. The UK was previously a world leader in renewable energy engineering and design, but companies have shut down or are cancelling projects in the wake of the policy change in the UK. The government’s evil energy policy is doing little more than increasing pollution while killing jobs and innovation.

The government has changed copyright law to make most people in the UK criminals. In 2014 the government passed a law to make it OK to rip CDs for personal use (e.g. putting the music on your iPod or your phone), but the law was drafted so badly that the music industry had the high court rule it illegal, and anyone who rips a CD is a criminal.

No it’s fair to say that the music industry is the most evil here – to expect people to pay twice to listen to their legally purchased music just to listen to it on a different machine is ridiculous. Forcing the courts to make everyone criminals for doing that is way worse that what the government did in this case, so 1-0 to the music industry so far. Determined to not be out-evilled though, the government is proposing to make it illegal to take photos. More specifically, unless you check if any of the objects in the picture are copyrighted, you can’t take a picture without the copyright owner’s permission;

This leads to some interesting results. Could people carry a bottle of coke (a copyrighted shape) with them to prevent any photos of them from being published without coke’s permission? Could celebrities have to buy some cheap Homebase furniture to sit on when they give magazine interviews? Will the Royal College of Art be demanding that Snappy Snaps hands over copies of all photos to monitor for copyright violation, like the movie industry already does with ISPs? Well, if that is the case, the government has already stated that it doesn’t care – the onus is on the photographer to find any potentially copyrighted items in their photos and to find the licence owner. Forget the fact that it’s impractical – we’re all criminals anyway. Mwhahaha